Member

Junior Member

To be honest, playing ArmA is making landscapes from Skyrim and all these other RPGs look small and artificial in comparison.

It's not just because ArmA 2 and 3 are bigger games either. They way they realistically scale hills, valleys, forests, and general countryside just feels a lot more expansive than what I see in Skyrim. Another big thing is ArmA doesn't have any impassable cliffs and mountains that jut out from the landscape.

I know that's probably because those RPGs are offering a more guided experience (though that doesn't explain Skyrim), but maybe that's part of the problem. It'd be awesome if I could play a modern RPG with a world that's scaled 1:1 or nearly 1:1. Withcer 3 is probably the best hope right now.

Thanks, neoenigma/jim! I'm only particularly interested in playing ME3 for the high-res textures and since the ME3explorer apparently added a .tpf tool that works better than the .mod maker. It seems to work more stable now, at least for me, so I'm running everything without texmod, which does wonders for the performance in the game.

I love your shots for most if not all games, btw, but you probably already know that

Member

1. To all people that apply downsampling: Do you use it in all of your games?

2. Is it better to have no "normal ingame" AA options enabled, while still downsampling to the max? Or is it better that all of the ingame AA is maxed out first and then AFTER that see how far you can downsample?

3. Will this make my GPU run hotter? Basically, is it dangerous for any part of my PC?

4. Would OC'ing my GPU be beneficial?

5. How does downsampling rate in the "OCD forever tweaking" field? Can you basically tweak endlessy forever to get it running at an acceptable fps or are there just hard boundaries where either you can make it fps-wise, or you just can't.

6. Do you apply one resolution for all of your games or does every game have their own custom resolution?

7. Would it be that by downsampling The Witcher 2 I could get it to look better than The Witcher 3 (theoretically wise)?

8. Could you downsample a game like The Witcher 3 at launch or would that just melt our computer?

Banned

1. To all people that apply downsampling: Do you use it in all of your games?

2. Is it better to have no "normal ingame" AA options enabled, while still downsampling to the max? Or is it better that all of the ingame AA is maxed out first and then AFTER that see how far you can downsample?

3. Will this make my GPU run hotter? Basically, is it dangerous for any part of my PC?

4. Would OC'ing my GPU be beneficial?

5. How does downsampling rate in the "OCD forever tweaking" field? Can you basically tweak endlessy forever to get it running at an acceptable fps or are there just hard boundaries where either you can make it fps-wise, or you just can't.

6. Do you apply one resolution for all of your games or does every game have their own custom resolution?

7. Would it be that by downsampling The Witcher 2 I could get it to look better than The Witcher 3 (theoretically wise)?

8. Could you downsample a game like The Witcher 3 at launch or would that just melt our computer?

1. I use it when I can or where its most beneficial. Its not the end-all, be-all of image quality, though. And my rig can only take so much. So I don't downsample every game, no. If you're an IQ whore, you might want to downsample more often than I do. Up to you.

2. You can mix and match regular AA, injected AA and downsampling as much as your heart desires. I usually always have some form of AA on in-game to combine with downsampling and I imagine most people do, too.

3. It can make your GPU run hotter simply by virtue of pushing it harder. But that is not specific to downsampling. Technically, if there were any worries, it would be your monitor, but nobody ever actually gets damage there, so its basically perfectly safe.

4. Yes, overclocking your GPU is certainly beneficial for this.

5. You can run into a CPU-bottleneck and not get a better framerate out of a game, but sure, downsampling adds another layer of 'settings' on top of the in-game settings(or injected settings) to mess with in the fight for best IQ/framerate balance. But its not a terribly complicated one. I usually downsample from 1440p and leave it be. You can always push for higher if you want(great for taking screenshots). Or you can even just do a very minor downsample of like 1260p or whatever. Up to you.

6. You can do it however you like. You create a set of custom resolutions in Nvidia Control Panel(or AMD equivalent) and then can pick from them in-game. So you can use a set downsample for all games or not. 'Not' is probably more ideal as not every game has the same level of performance and aliasing issues.

7. It depends on what The Witcher 3 does in terms of anti-aliasing. If it has an in-game setting for 4xSSAA(which is a kind of downsampling in and of itself), you're unlikely to beat that downsampling on your own in TW2 without a beastly rig. And this only applies to the cleanness/aliasing of a title. I cant downsample Bioshock 1 to the extreme and make it look better than Crysis 3 no matter what.

8. Nothing stopping you downsampling The Witcher 3 at launch except the horsepower of your rig. Some people with really powerful PC's may opt to downsample and play at 30fps, I'm sure.

Member

1. To all people that apply downsampling: Do you use it in all of your games?

2. Is it better to have no "normal ingame" AA options enabled, while still downsampling to the max? Or is it better that all of the ingame AA is maxed out first and then AFTER that see how far you can downsample?

I usually only use downsampling when there's no better AA solution available. Most DX11 games for instance tend have either no AA options, or very inefficient MSAA. Hitman Absolution is a good example of that, downsampling is the best option for that game.

But if it's a DX9 game you can often use Nvidia Inspector (unless you have AMD) to force SGSSAA, or if the game already has MSAA you can enhance it to SGSSAA with Inspector. This is usally the best AA technique as it cleans up almost all jaggies and has a relatively low performance impact.

So for me downsampling is usually a last resort because it's very demanding and it it locks my 120hz to 60hz

Banned

I'm not at home so I can't give you the exact post processing settings but... I'm using GeDoSaTo and downsampling from 7680x3240. Using the asmodean ("alternate") post processing. Bit of Bloom, sharpening, and curves. It's mostly the downsampling though.

The end effect is basically what you're saying, but it's not really what is necessarily happening.

It doesn't make the textures sharper, but if the texture itself is large enough, then there's definitely a benefit.

For example, if a game has a 64x64 ground texture that takes up most of the screen, it's not going to benefit in sharpness from downsampling. But if it has a 4096x4096 ground texture, you'll likely be able to discern more detail in it if you downsample.